Well..... the truck has been on hold for quite some time and I'm just now getting the funds and motivation to make forward progress. I'm tired of adding pics to the carnage thread so I decided to upgrade a few things. First I'd like to say that I wish I would have done all these upgrades before I put the turbo on the truck, it would have saved me a butt load of cash and heartache . To start with I thought my th400 I built had gone out again but to my surprise it was the used tci super street fighter converter that I had bought used that was giving me trouble. I will never buy another used converter and especially not a tci converter. I sent it back to tci and had them fix it, re stall it to 3400, and add an anti ballooning plate for 180 bucks. While I had the trans out I went thru it to check everything out and see how it was holding up. All the clutches looked just like they did the day I built it. I decided to rolerize the forward hub and upgrade to a 6 clutch forward, 4 clutch intermediate , and 5 clutch directs set up. Had planned on a trans brake but decided to use the money elsewhere on the truck.
Next I bought a ford 9" with a back brace someone had tacked onto it for 100 bucks. Took it apart and found it had fairly new brakes and was very clean inside the brake drums.
I disassembled it and had the housing sand blasted then ground the tacks off the back brace and did some modifications to it so it would fit the housing a little better. Working in a machine shop most of my life I knew that if I welded the brace onto the housing that it was going to warp the housing. After extensive research on the proper way to weld the back brace on I designed a jig. I turned 2 pieces of 2.5" solid to 2.470 to slide into the bore where the seals fit into the housing
then welded them to some heavy duty angle iron.
with this set up I can rotate the housing around any way I need to for welding or straightening purposes .
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after I got everything welded up it still pulled the housing a little. 
you can see howuch it pulled 
from this point I took my bottle jack and dial indicator and straightened it back out. Hard to really tell from the pics though. 
. I have the spring pads and shock mounts that I cut off one of the many 10 bolts I've destroyed that will be going on next. I'm gonna tack them on when I get the rear under the truck so that I can get my pinion angle right. The 9 will be equipped with a spool, 373's , and strange axles and 3rd member. I ordered my heim joints to build my own cal tracks per 02camaross's wright up. 
